04/26

Everyday is different and today I’m trying desperately to escape the weight of premenstrual gloom hanging around my ankles…my hummingbird of a mind seeks to be set free into my own psychic world but instead I am here at work talking to one million different strangers in a drone of monotony. Of course, everything is what you make it and it doesn’t have to be so dull. But some days my stubborn streak comes out so fiery and I think I’d just love to not have to work another goddamn day in my life! 

Yesterday I was swimming freely through the stream of life and contentment flitted gently through my consciousness, making lunch with my mom and talking about all the things we have such vehement opinions on (I get it from her), perusing Bernal Hill and searching for the owls that inhabit it. The sides of the road on the path upwards are covered in springtime flowers and the smell is just intoxicating. They’re all pink on the side I was on and they complement so well the old San Francisco homes behind them, then the cityscape amidst lavender skies, tying together the entirety of the Bay, the Oakland hills in the distance, the lights of tiny cars on the bridge. In these moments I can’t believe I live here, can’t believe anyone would live anywhere else. 

But it seems I’m in a moment of temporary forgetfulness - how to bring the peace of moments spent and gone into the unfolding of everything else I don’t want to do in life? Everyone’s got to. Heartache is a constant backdrop to my world for the last half a year and so when I forget my whimsy at home it’s just me and minimum wage labor and my aching alone. Not really alone, but it seems so. I forget everyone has a story to tell - even if just in a small passing gaze, in the way they say hello, in the way some folks have got the energy to exchange a warm smile and some don’t. 

I rewatched Spirited Away last night and bawled my eyes out. It’s the perfect recipe - somehow they capture the wistfulness so precisely, the ache of lessons learned alongside someone whose heart matches so perfectly the ridges of your own. And when you find connection like that the loss of it is not so much about them but more so the spiritual ache of being a person and growing and the cost of it all, and gosh wouldn’t it hurt just a little bit less if life didn’t have a way of pulling us all apart. Sometimes it’s just for a moment, but time has a funny way of moving by as I age. Today is one day, and without a doubt tomorrow will be different, and then so will the next day, and the one after that, and then the one after that, and the one after that…